Diversity Conference brings Wikimedians to Berlin

This November, Wikimedia Deutschland hosted over 80 Wikimedians in Berlin for the first ever Wikimedia Diversity Conference. For two days, we talked about the need, challenges and solutions for bringing more diversity – in terms of gender, geography, and beyond – to our community and to our content, in order to fulfill our vision of sharing the sum of all human knowledge with the world.

We left with a hopeful sense that there are lots of enthusiastic people concerned about diversity in our movement, and that interesting initiatives aimed at broadening our community are cropping up all over, even while being reminded that we don’t yet have a blueprint for how to accomplish these goals.

The Ada Initiative’s Valerie Aurora and Alyssa Wright from OpenStreetMap each shared information from other open source communities they’ve participated in, calling upon participants to lend and borrow strategies across communities grappling with similar issues. Many attendees agreed that proactively inviting diverse groups of contributors and then providing social support to encourage participation can be a meaningful way to foster increased diversity in our communities. This theme was explicitly raised in a presentation by Jake Orlowitz and Siko Bouterse, and it reverberated in several other conversations and initiatives discussed throughout the conference.

The conference ended with participants creating actions items for four areas of diversity-focused work: women, LGBT, geographic diversity, and technology. We also started a Diversity page on Meta-wiki to better communicate the importance of diversity in the Wikimedia movement and to collectively imagine how we will get to a more diverse future together. Improvements to this new page are welcome.

What still seems missing among these various discrete points of learning and action, though, is a concrete sense that we have an overarching strategy for increasing diversity in our community, and a common set of tools to draw upon. This was the first global Wikimedia gathering specifically focused on diversity. As we continue the conversation, can we begin to weave these various findings, ideas and tools into a strategic plan for the future?

You can watch videos from conference participants on Wikimedia Commons here. Complete conference documentation is available on Meta-wiki. Many thanks to our wonderful hosts at Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin for a well-organized event, and to all participants for sharing their knowledge and experiences at this conference. We look forward to continuing this conversation in the coming months.

4 Comments on Diversity Conference brings Wikimedians to Berlin

Thank you for this blog post Siko! It’s been a real pleasure hosting this conference and seeing people throughout the movement participating and dedicating their time to this important topic. Diversity continues to be an important and relevant topic for Wikimedia Deutschland in upcoming months and years, in terms of research as well as in the practical dimension. We are now at a point where we collected a lot of information about what diversity means, why it is important and what has to be done in order to enhance diversity. However, it is important not to remain on this meta level but to move from theory to practice. Thus, the next step now is to put theory and ideas into action by identifying specific fields of action. Wikimedia Deutschland ist planning to publish a “diversity compass” in early 2014 that will identify several important fields of action related to diversity such as more appreciation or a sustainable welcoming culture and implement specific project proposals for each field. We are looking forward to take ideas to the next level.

Hans, who is the “you” that is skipping half of the world’s population? Can you identify anyone who would like to promote Wikipedia to an older demographic? I expect there would be a lot of support for that person joining the Wikipedia community as an activist when that person appears.

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